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The Bible: A Book Written for Adults?

A friend of mine and of PoG’s posted a great photo on his twitter account this morning. He was buying a bible app for his iPad, and the content rating for the app was a little unexpected. Check it out…

The Bible: For Ages 12+

He laughed, and I did too when I saw this picture. But the truth is that all of that stuff really is present in the Bible.

How often to we really stop to take a look at the Bible? I mean, not just read our favorite verses or highlight a passage that our pastor pointed out in this Sunday’s sermon, but really read it? Read it as an epic, awesome story?

The truth is that if the entire Bible were turned into a movie, it would have to be rated ‘R’, and even then only if some of the sexy stuff got edited out. It’s not really a book intended for a young audience, at least not if we’re going by our culture’s current rating scale. Yet this is a book that we start teaching to our children at a very young age. I see only a couple of real possibilities here…

We can either teach only certain parts of the Bible to young children and forbid or discourage them from reading the other parts, or we can start early teaching the whole thing to kids, and do the hard work along the way of walking through the difficult/bloody/sexy parts with them. The first way is much easier, but I believe that selective reading in scripture leads to a selective mindset theologically (i.e. we become much more inclined to pick and choose what we want to believe and just ignore the parts we can’t deal with easily). The second way is much more difficult, requiring a very hands-on approach on the part of parents and pastors. An approach, unfortunately, which I believe many parents and pastors are at best unable, and at worst unwilling, to take with the young people in their lives.

I want to know what you think. Are there parts of the Bible that we should censor from kids until they’re a certain age? Which parts? What age?